5.  The applicant was born in 1930 and lived in Puhoi.
6.  The facts of the case, as submitted by the parties, may be summarised as follows.
7.  The applicant deposited money in three different accounts in the Savings Bank ('the Bank'), which was, during Soviet times, State-owned.
8.  In 1994 Parliament adopted Decision no. 201-XIII on the indexing of citizens' savings in the Savings Bank of Moldova” (“the 1994 decision”) whereby persons who had reached the age of 60 by 1 January 1994 and who had savings in their accounts in the Bank on 2 January 1992 were entitled to recover a part of their deposits at the rate of one Moldovan leu (MDL) for one Soviet rouble for the first thousand roubles deposited in each account.
9.  On 16 February 1995 the Government adopted Decision no. 108, whereby it created a Commission charged with establishing the amount of compensation to be transferred by the Ministry of Finance (“the Ministry”) by the 25th day of each month to the Bank for compensation purposes, on the basis of the allocations made for that purpose in the State budget for the relevant year.
10.  The applicant had more than a thousand roubles in each of his three accounts in the Bank and he claimed accordingly MDL 3,000 (the equivalent of 750 United States dollars (USD)). On 7 June 2000 he received MDL 570 after the Ministry of Finance (“the Ministry”) transferred money to the Bank for compensation purposes. He continued to request the remaining amount and to complain to various authorities.
11.  On 8 November 2001 he initiated court proceedings against the Bank and the Ministry to recover the remaining amount and seeking compensation for the late payment (since the value of the money was depreciating because of high inflation) and for non-pecuniary damage caused by having to wait for the payment (the applicant was recognised as second-degree disabled and had a monthly State pension of MDL 89). Both defendants accepted that the applicant had a right to obtain the outstanding amount of compensation, and stated that the delay in paying was due to the failure to include in the State budget the allocations for that purpose. According to the Ministry, during 1995-1997 it transferred to the Bank 26% of the money necessary to pay the compensation in full to all those affected by the 1994 decision. However, the State budget did not allocate any further funds during 1998-2000, while an additional 7% of the total amount was allocated in the budget for the year 2001. The applicant did not receive any compensation in 2001.
12.  On 4 March 2002 the Centru District Court partly accepted the applicant's claim. It found that the main responsibility for the delay in paying his outstanding compensation lay with the Ministry, which had not transferred the necessary money to the Bank. It ordered the Bank to pay the applicant MDL 266 and the Ministry to pay him MDL 2,163, which constituted the remaining amount due under the 1994 decision (a total of MDL 2,429, or EUR 210 at the time). The court rejected the claim for compensation in respect of pecuniary and non-pecuniary damage because there was no law dealing with such claims.
13.  In an appeal, the applicant expressly requested the court, on the basis of Article 4 of the Constitution, to apply directly Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention and Article 13 of the Convention as regards the absence of domestic remedies.
14.  On 7 May 2002 the Chişinău Regional Court upheld the judgment of 4 March 2002, repeating the reasoning of the first-instance court in rejecting the claim for compensation in respect of pecuniary and non-pecuniary damage.
15.  In an appeal, the applicant repeated his arguments advanced before the lower courts and relied in addition on Article 6 of the Civil Code (see paragraph 18 below).
16.  On 3 September 2002 the Court of Appeal also upheld the lower courts' judgments and confirmed their reasoning in rejecting the claim of compensation in respect of pecuniary and non-pecuniary damage, because it “had no support in law”. That judgment was final. On 29 July 2004 the outstanding amount was transferred to the applicant's account.